5th May 2011 Archive

Oracle is going after the Apache Software Foundation and its open-source version of Java to find the smoking gun it clearly believes will prove Google deliberately violated patents and copyrights it owns on Java.

Red Hat is ramping up to be the first billion-dollar open source baby, and more than anything else, the commercial Linux operating system and middleware distributor has its channel partners to thank for the growth.

Even as the LimeWire damages case grinds its way through the courts, a group of film and music artists led by wealthy film producer and founder of FilmOn.com Alki David are suing CBS Interactive and CNET for distributing the LimeWire application.

Members of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team are giving themselves a pat on the back for making it easier to delete the privacy menace known as Adobe Flash Cookies. Too bad the IE developers aren't tackling a similar snoop threat embedded in Microsoft's very own Silverlight framework.

I decided to avoid last week's royal rave-up by engaging in some retail therapy. We’ve seen a number of shopping-related apps recently, but this price-comparison app is the one I've found most useful when I’m in shopping mode.

Janet (UK), the organisation responsible for the UK's higher education and research network, has announced that a new high capacity data service for universities and colleges will be launched in June 2011.

If claims that Apple's next iPad will sport a 2048 x 1536 display containing four times as many pixels as the current one stretched credibility, one rumour, that successor to the iPad 2 will incorporate a glasses-free 3D screen, takes it to breaking point.

It used to be simple. Users could either run a local operating system, or use a thin client with screen, keyboard and mouse talking to an operating system running on the server. Today there are many models of desktop virtualisation, and few safe assumptions.

It’s a sad fact that as the picture quality of flatscreen TVs have been steadily improving, their audio performance has been dropping off. This is mainly due to the fact that TVs are becoming slimmer and slimmer, leaving less room for decent sized speakers. If your other half won’t hear tell of a surround sound systems and all the associated cables, then a soundbar might provide a more harmonious route to beefier audio from your TV.

PC buyers have become used to having to do most of the donkey work when it comes to setting up their machines, but Hewlett Packard has gone one better by supplying keyboards that are not just wireless, but letter-less and digit-less too.

More details have emerged on the US government's plan to build a spacecraft capable of "a journey between the stars". Astoundingly, it is expected that this can be achieved with no more than "several hundred thousand dollars" of government funding.

If the murder-sim genre has taught us anything, it’s that gamers require little pretext to kill. It helps, of course, when justification is provided through exposition, or by that simplest casus belli of all, an enemy pulling the trigger first. But occasionally, along comes a game like SOCOM 4 to prove all we really need to know to justify our virtual bloodlust is, to quote Aliens’ Vasquez, “where they are.”

Microsoft is all for the cloud, says chief executive Steve Ballmer. IBM has its new Smart Business Cloud. Oracle has its Exalogic cloud in a box. Amazon’s cloud services are growing apace. Salesforce.com and Google have always been cloud.

It has been more than a year since IBM got its first Power7-based machines out the door, and about six months since the chips were fully ramped across the Power Systems lineup. The server processor racket waits for no one, and a slowpoke will quickly get left behind in the volume and midrange space. And so Big Blue has to continue to advance the Power chips if it wants to get all of those systems, software, and services revenues these chips drive.

There is a scene during the underrated '70s conspiracy thriller Three Days of the Condor when Robert Redford's bookish spy is asked to verify his identity when calling into base. He resists, insisting that the person who took his call needs to verify their own identity before he gives anything away.

Cisco Systems has taken some hit points in recent quarters from its bloated business lines and unfocused product and marketing efforts. In response today, it announced its expected corporate reorganization. Most changes are in its engineering efforts, which is a tacit admission that the data networking giant has as much a hardware and software problem as a sales problem.

Mozilla officials have refused a US government request to ban a Firefox add-on that helps people to access sites that use internet domain names confiscated in an unprecedented seizure earlier this year.

A Massachusetts court has denied Google's efforts to dismiss a hot-button lawsuit that accuses the company of unfairly using its Android operating system to strong-arm mobile handset makers into using Google location services rather than those of rival Skyhook.